242 Quotes by J. M. Coetzee

Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought.

Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.

She is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed.

Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of body against itself but of the will against the body.

The sun’s touch is kind.